You cannot get in
Most lockouts are boring. The order below matters because the first item changes what you should do next.
Before anything elseDo not go looking for a support contact. There is no email, chat group or messaging account belonging to any market, so everything presenting itself that way is targeting people in exactly your situation.
In this order
- Verify you are on a genuine address. A login refusing correct credentials is what a clone looks like after it has already taken them. Check before retrying, because each retry hands them over again.
- Try another address. Sessions are shared across the three, so failing at one and working at another points at that address rather than your account.
- Build a new circuit. A slow or dying circuit produces failures that read exactly like rejection, including codes appearing wrong.
- Check your clock. Time based codes fail when a machine has drifted, which is common on systems that were off for a while or run isolated. This is a surprising share of reports.
- Check the username, character by character. Not the password. People change a character or the case and then debug the wrong field for an hour.
- Wait an hour. Repeated attempts hit rate limiting, which looks identical to refusal and makes the next attempt worse.
If verification failed at step one
Treat the credentials as gone and follow the ordered response for typed credentials. The account comes before the balance, and the message log comes before both.
If recovery material is the problem
Recovery works when you hold what you were given at setup. Without it, recovery is limited and frequently not possible, because the alternative would be a mechanism for taking over accounts you do not own.
That is a real outcome and it is the reason the credentials page spends most of its length on saving recovery material rather than on password advice. If you saved it, use it. If not, the honest answer is that the account may be gone, and the lesson transfers to the next one.
What will not help
| Attempt | Result |
|---|---|
| Looking for support outside the platform | It does not exist, and what answers is hostile |
| Posting details on a forum | Advertises an account worth attacking |
| Trying many passwords quickly | Rate limiting, which makes the next hour worse |
| A new address somebody offers | The standard follow up to a lockout, and the timing is deliberate |
| Creating a second account to ask about the first | Reaches nobody who can act |